If you had one of the best golf course maintenance crews in the world, how quickly could you conduct a complete greens renovation?
Thanks to Pinehurst No. 4, we no longer have to wonder. The answer, it turns out, is just 11 weeks.
It was mid-May when Pinehurst No. 4 announced it would be closing for the foreseeable future in order to complete a “full greens restoration” — the product of substandard playing conditions “well below” the Pinehurst standard.
But according to the resort, the course is now open again, with brand-new greens to boot, ready for the last days of summer and the beginning of the fall high season.
In a new video released to Pinehurst social media feeds, members of the resort’s prodigious agronomy team talked through the blazing-fast process of renewing the greens — and the underlying problems the resort says it has now fixed that should prevent the course from issues in the future.
“Prior to closing the golf course, some of the greens really [struggled]. It started out with about 12 of the greens had bare spots on them,” said Matt Barksdale, Pinehurst’s VP of golf. “Looked like they were almost cut lower in certain areas than they really were, and some of that was due to the thinning of the grass and then ultimately ended up spreading to close to all 18 greens.”
The closure arrived as a disappointment both for the resort, which also closed No. 4 last year for a chunk of the summer to host the U.S. Open, and guests, who have grown increasingly fond of No. 4 as a whimsical counterpart to the championship test at No. 2. But there was at least one group excited by the challenge: the agronomy team, which took advantage of the restoration effort to do a complete teardown, installing new irrigation systems underneath the sod that would prolong the life of the new putting surfaces once installed.
The first step in that process, Bob Farren, the director of golf course maintenance said, was a laser-map of the existing green contours to ensure that Pinehurst No. 4 would lose none of the most recent redesign from Gil Hanse. After the lasering was complete, Pinehurst maintenance crews worked with Hanse to ensure he signed off on all of the club’s updated green maps.
Then came time to get to work. Pinehurst crews wound up ripping up not just the existing sod, but also the sand and gravel beneath — going “all the way down to the base layer,” in Farren’s terminology — to ensure that the renovation project fixed the underlying issue. After installing new drainage systems, maintenance crews covered the surfaces with gravel, then sand, then sod in Hanse’s image.
“You build it up in layers, just like building a cake,” Farren said. “Build it up in layers, [then] replicate the final surface of it with the laser scan as well. Then you scan it again and grade it back to those exact elevations.”
Once the grass was down, the hard work began for the Pinehurst crews. The resort took sod from a field — as opposed to growing in grass on the putting surface — to speed the renovation and reduce some of the firmness of a grow-in. Still, maintenance crews had to get the putting surfaces from sod to playing shape in the span of just a few weeks.
“Even though you can check the box, okay, we’ve built this green well, now we’ve got to start maintaining it,” Farren said. “Water, nutrition, feeding properly, disease control, top dressing to cultivate the surface, just as you would maintain a putting green on a course that’s open.”
In the end, the course was in pristine condition for its Aug. 7 reopening, just 11 weeks after the difficult decision to close — a miraculous feat of knowhow and commitment from the “home of American golf.”
To watch the full video detailing the restoration process at No. 4, check out the video below.
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